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Expand the House?

WASHINGTON — In America, democracy follows the simple principle of one person, one vote, right?

Unless, that is, you live in Montana, where your vote carries a little more than half as much weight in the House of Representatives as that of someone living in Rhode Island. Or if you live in Utah, where your vote counts about two-thirds as much as it would in Iowa.

With the 2010 Census around the corner, Washington and the various state capitals will soon turn their attention to carving out congressional districts across the nation. And once again, political leaders are preparing to cobble together a patchwork quilt of districts that will leave some Americans underrepresented.

Redrawing the lines will address some of the population shifts over the last decade, but much of the disparity will remain, because it is built into the system. In theory, every member of the House represents roughly the same number of people. But because each state gets at least one seat, no matter how small its population, and because the overall size of the House has not changed in a century, the number of people represented by a single congressman can vary widely.

The most populous district in America right now, according to the latest Census data, is Nevada’s 3rd District, where 960,000 people are represented in the House by just one member. All of Montana’s 958,000 people likewise have just one vote in the House. By contrast, 523,000 in Wyoming get the same voting power, as do the 527,000 in one of Rhode Island’s two districts and the 531,000 in the other.

That 400,000-person disparity between top and bottom has generated a federal court challenge that is set to be filed Thursday in Mississippi, charging that the system effectively disenfranchises people in certain states. The lawsuit asks the courts to order the House to fix the problem by increasing its size from 435 seats to at least 932, or perhaps as many as 1,761. That way, the plaintiffs argue, every state can have districts that are close to parity.

“When you look at the data, those are pretty wide disparities,” said Scott Scharpen, a former health care financial consultant from California who has organized the court challenge. “As an American looking at it objectively, how can we continue with a system where certain voters’ voting power is substantially smaller than others’?”

Of course, a larger House may not thrill Americans who are tired of Congress, and may make an already unwieldy body more so. “You may create a more equitable system that’s less governable, and I’m not sure the country comes out ahead,” said Kenneth Prewitt, a former Census director who now teaches at Columbia University.

Aside from the logistical challenges and expense of accommodating two or three times as many representatives on Capitol Hill, the idea would certainly be resisted by incumbents who jealously guard their authority. “It dilutes your own power,” said Norman J. Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

The issue traces back to the founding of the country. The Constitution stipulated that every 10 years, the House should be reapportioned so that each state had at lease one representative and that no Congressional district contained fewer than 30,000 people. But it was left to Congress to decide how many total House seats there should be.

The original House had 65 representatives, one for every 33,000 people. As the country’s population grew over the next century, so did the size of the House, until it reached 435 in 1911, when each member at that time representing an average of 212,000 people.

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But Congress refused to reapportion after the 1920 Census, as a wave of immigration threatened to shift voting power from the South and Midwest to the urban Northeast. Eventually, Congress voted to keep the House at 435 seats regardless of rising population. Except for a brief period when it enlarged to 437 because Alaska and Hawaii had joined the union with one seat each, the House has remained at 435 ever since.

With each member now representing about 700,000 constituents on average, the idea of increasing the size of the House has come up in recent years, but it has not attracted much support. George Will, the columnist, once suggested increasing the House to 1,000 seats, and Representative Alcee Hastings, Democrat of Florida, has introduced resolutions seeking to study the matter, only to be ignored. A conference on Capitol Hill in 2007 explored the issue without leading to action.

“We have tripled our population since 1910,” said Jane S. De Lung, president of the Population Resource Center, a nonprofit research organization that sponsored the conference. Members have trouble staying in touch with so many constituents, she said, and the population is only growing further. “If you can’t do it with 700,000, how in the world are you going to do it with 1 million?”

To mount the legal challenge that is being filed on Thursday, Mr. Scharpen recruited Michael P. Farris, a prominent conservative constitutional lawyer and chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association. Together they recruited plaintiffs in five states that were relatively underrepresented after the 2000 Census — Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota, Delaware and Utah — and named as defendants the census director, the commerce secretary and clerk of the House.

Mr. Scharpen and Mr. Farris noted that some foreign parliaments are significantly larger than the United States House of Representatives — the House of Commons in Britain and the Bundestag in Germany each have more than 600 seats with each member serving a much smaller population. If there were more representatives serving smaller districts, they argued, each would not have to raise as much campaign money and could be more attentive to fewer constituents.

“It’ll be better government,” Mr. Farris said. “The proportional size of our government is not consistent with other western democracies.”

The Supreme Court opened the door to judicial intervention in redistricting with its Baker vs. Carr decision in 1962 and then established the one-person, one vote principle a year later in Gray vs. Sanders, but it has generally applied that to equalizing districts within states, not across state lines. Montana sued after it lost one of its two seats following the 1990 Census, but the court ruled that Congress was within its authority to use the mathematical formula that it applied to calculate how many seats each state would get.

The difference this time, Mr. Farris said, is that the courts have not considered the proposed remedy of ordering Congress to increase the size of the House: “Nobody’s ever asked them before.”